As an avowed atheist living among a sea of believers (both locally and on the Internet), I have spent a lot of time discussing my beliefs (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The purpose of this blog is not to prove the non-existence of God or "de-convert" anybody from their faith, but simply to preserve some of these discussions and allow me to flesh them out through the process of writing them down, as well as to share them with anybody who might be interested in reading them.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

God of the Gaps

As we discover more and more of the laws of nature and are able to explain
how everything in the universe came to be in its current state through purely
physical means, where does that leave God? God is necessary, according to most
religions, to explain what cannot otherwise be explained. He is a supernatural
force that becomes the default explanation for anything we don't understand.
Once we understand everything, however, what is the rationale for still
believing that the universe needed a God? And if God is not a necessary force,
then he is nothing more than a figment of our collective consciousness.

Life was a lot simpler back when we didn't understand anything and it was
easy to just posit God (or gods) as the explanation for everything. Why did the
sun rise each morning? God did it. Why did it rain yesterday? God did it. Why
didn't it rain today? God did it. How did we get here? God did it. Why is there
so much pain and suffering in the world? God did, er, well let's just change
the subject, shall we? We laugh at
ancient cultures who invented gods to explain natural phenomena that we fully
understand today. And yet, some still cling to the "god" explanation
for the few things that we still don't have good explanations for (or things
which they personally don't understand).

As our knowledge of the universe has expanded, however, we've pushed the
necessity for God as an explanation into a smaller and smaller box, until he's
limited to having started the whole thing in motion in the first place but
hasn't really done much since then.

Science has done a wonderful job of explaining just about
every facet of creation to the point that "God" is no longer a
necessary explanation for anything. We're
still a bit fuzzy on how it all got started in the first place (although I
don't think modern scientists actually think it all suddenly appeared "OUT
OF NOTHING"). At most, that leaves open the possibility that some sort of
"god" started the whole process going and then left it to run
unassisted. Since there's no actual evidence of such a god apart from our lack
of understanding, however, there's really no good reason to assume that such a
god actually exists. Any more than there was a good reason to assume the
existence of Thor simply because we didn't understand how thunder and lightning
happened.

Yes, scientific theories come and go (or get refined over
time), and some things that we think we can fully explain today may turn out to
have a different explanation later on. But (and this is probably the most important point of all) even if every single scientific
theory ever advanced to explain the universe was completely and utterly wrong,
there still wouldn't be a single bit of good evidence to believe in the God of
the Bible (or any of the many, many other gods that have been written about
over the past thousands of years). And there are plenty of Muslims who are just
as convinced that Allah, as described in the Koran, is the one true God and not
the God of the Bible and they make the same exact arguments as Christians do to
justify their belief. They are just as sure, just as convinced, and just as
wrong.

...

Some have argued that since “science” (or, more properly, the scientific
method) does not currently provide an overarching and all-inclusive description
of reality, we therefore need God to explain what science cannot. To this argument, I offer the following
rebuttals:

The proper question is not does
science offer an overarching and all-inclusive description of reality, but
whether it can offer such a description. Just because we can't explain
everything at the moment doesn't mean we won't ever be able to.

This is a false dichotomy. Even if science can't explain everything about everything, that doesn't mean
that religion can (or that it can explain the "gaps" where science fails). Made up stories by ancient civilizations have no claim whatsoever to any sort of explanatory authority.

In other words, the scientific method is the only way we can
explain anything about anything. If something can't be explained via the
scientific method, it can't be explained, period. Lot's
of room for ideas, suggestions and general wishful thinking, true, but not
actual explanations.